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  • 2020-02-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Would the New Way Forward Act Protect Criminals from Deportation? (en)
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  • In February 2020 readers asked us about an opinion column written by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which claimed that a new bill proposed by U.S. House Democrats would, if passed in its current form, protect immigrants from deportation even if they commit crimes. The op-ed, published on Feb. 7, bore the headline Criminals Would Be Protected From Deportation Under Bill AOC and Other House Democrats Back. The piece included the following: Carlson's op-ed, and a subsequent segment on his Fox News show, featured numerous specific claims about the legislation, but the one that drew the most inquiries from Snopes readers was the same one Fox News included in its headline — that the New Way Forward Act would protect criminals from deportation. As a result, that claim is the focus of this particular fact check. If it were signed into law and implemented, the New Way Forward Act would bring about a number of changes to U.S. federal law on deportations. The following is a summary of those changes, as found in the version of the legislation published in December 2019 (the most up-to-date version at the time of Carlson's article and at the time of this fact check): Another section of the New Way Forward Act would give immigration judges significant new discretionary powers in deciding whether to issue a deportation order. Under existing law, judges are only allowed to consider the evidence produced at the hearing, before making their determination. Under the proposed legislation, judges would be able to weigh that evidence, including the existence of prior deportable offenses, against other factors. This means that even if an immigrant has been convicted of a deportable criminal offense, an immigration judge could, under the bill, decline to order their deportation in pursuit of humanitarian purposes, to assure family unity, or when it is otherwise in the public interest. Clearly, the provisions of the New Way Forward Act would make it more difficult to deport immigrants who have committed certain crimes, most notably the removal of lower-level drug crimes as a deportable offense, and the proposed requirement that aggravated felonies be redefined as carrying at least a five-year prison sentence in order to form the basis of a deportation order. Giving immigration judges the ability to exercise discretion and decline to order a deportation for humanitarian reasons is also likely to lower the deportation rate by a certain degree, though it should be noted that the legislation would not impose any legal requirement on judges to be more lenient in their decisions. The headline of the article -- Criminals Would Be Protected From Deportation Under Bill AOC and Other House Democrats Back -- risked giving some readers the mistaken impression that the New Way Forward Act would entirely protect immigrants who have violated U.S. criminal law from being deported. That would not be the case -- such offenders could and undoubtedly would continue to be deported under the proposed legislation. Rather, the bill would mean certain offenses could no longer form the sole basis of a deportation order, and the sentencing threshold for aggravated felonies would be increased from one year to five years, thereby enhancing the protections against deportation available to immigrants who were convicted of such crimes and sentenced to between one and five years in prison. The body of Carlson's article outlined those facts with greater nuance than the headline did. (en)
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